SELWESKI: The world squandered an opportunity in Sochi

The first time that I realized the sheer intensity of the local Ukrainian population’s love of their homeland was when George H.W. Bush attended the annual Captive Nations dinner at the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Warren during his presidential campaign of 1988.

Bush’s expressions of solidarity with the Captive Nations – Ukraine and the many other republics that had been swallowed by the Soviet Union – were cheered boisterously by the large audience.

To simply say that the substantial population of Ukrainians in our area represents a “proud people” is certainly not befitting their ingenuity. A few decades ago, these immigrants who had fled Soviet tyranny moved to south Warren and established a church, a cultural center, a housing complex, a school and a credit union.

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Ukraine is a place with a 44,000-year history, but in the past century alone it’s endured occupation, starvation, corruption, recession, hyper-inflation and rigged elections. Still, Ukrainians continue to rejoice in their 1991 extraction from Soviet rule. Beyond pride, Ukrainian-Americans feel an intense bitterness toward their former occupiers, the Russians.

So, I can only imagine how maddening it was for our Ukrainian people to endure over the last few months Vladimir Putin’s bizarre rise to international respect.

One international poll taken last fall after the advent of Syria’s now-crumbling agreement -- brokered by its ally Russia -- to remove all chemical weapons from their country actually placed Putin at the top, as the globe’s most influential leader. Now, Putin somehow finds himself as one of the nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Worse yet, in the United States some divisive congressional members have expressed admiration for Putin’s macho-man brand of foreign policy. The snarky Obama-haters who have opposed U.S. drones and Syrian missile strikes and Libyan intervention now praise the Russian thug, a former KGB officer, as a strong, decisive leader.

In Michigan, some of the more vile right-wingers recently applauded Putin for his infamous anti-gay policies.

How can it be that, just two decades after the Cold War ended, prominent American officials wish that the American president would act more like a Russian dictator?

Relying upon the usual Russian flair for propaganda, Putin last month used the Sochi Winter Olympics as his big international stage, a showcase of a “new Russia.” At the same time, he was secretly prepared to take aggressive military action in neighboring Ukraine, if given the opportunity.

For the rest of the world, the Sochi games now serve as a lost opportunity to stand for human rights and self-determination.

Putin somehow had gathered up enough goodwill so that the world largely ignored the long list of failures for these Olympic Games, from unfinished buildings in the Olympic Village to massive cost overruns to poor accommodations at many living quarters.

From day one, a big question should have been how Putin’s regime ever finagled the International Olympic Committee to hold the 2014 games in Sochi, a resort town with palm trees, where people were sunbathing on the beach while the winter sports competitors toiled in rain, fog and slush.

The athletes in Sochi were understandably focused on their events and not eager to appear ungrateful. The sports journalists, who are not equipped with the mindset to question authority, turned the Sochi failures into a running gag on Twitter.

I’m not one to favor politicizing the Olympics. I still believe Jimmy Carter made a mistake by boycotting the Russian Olympics in 1980 after the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan. It’s more effective to use the world stage of the Olympic Games to make your objections known in somewhat subtle ways.

Consider the impact if successful Sochi athletes had dedicated their medals to the people of Ukraine or war-torn Syria while giving TV interviews that reached every corner of the globe.

Imagine if the closing ceremonies in Sochi had featured dozens of nations – the U.S., Canada, Australia, the EU countries, the former Captive Nations of the USSR – all marching into the stadium carrying the flag of their nation, plus the Syrian flag and the flag of Ukraine.

Despite his supreme arrogance, I suspect Putin would have been so humiliated by his tainted $50 billion extravaganza that it’s hard to imagine he would not have taken a more measured approach toward the crisis in Ukraine.

After his Ukrainian puppet, Viktor Yanukovych, was twice rejected by the people of Ukraine – once due to a stolen election in 2004 and most recently due to his penchant for killing dozens of demonstrators in Kiev’s Independence Square – Putin decided that an invasion of Crimea, the lone section of Ukraine with a majority Russian ethnic population (thanks to Stalin’s brutality), was in order.

The pugnacious president’s bid to stir the pot was so aggressive that Crimea now has a reported 30,000 Russian troops wreaking havoc, even invading a Ukrainian military base. In response, Putin faces sanctions from the U.S. and European Union.

His response? Bring it on.

Putin’s delusional approach toward his grand dreams of creating a new Russian empire are epitomized by an upcoming March 16 public vote in Crimea to determine whether the Ukrainian province should become an appendage of the Russian Federation. Sounds like democracy. But this is a vote that will take place in a tiny territory surrounded by 30,000 heavily armed Russian troops. How do you think that will turn out?

At the same time, Putin is the Slavic strongman who has forcefully protected his Mideast ally, the monster of Syria, President Bashar Assad, who engaged in one of the most horrific attacks by a leader on his own people in the last half century – a chemical weapons strike in the middle of the night that killed 4,000 people, including hundreds of children.

As the death toll in Syria’s civil war approaches 150,000 and heart-wrenching photos emerge of thousands of malnourished Syrians waiting in line for food, the international peace negotiations have hit a wall. That’s because Putin’s Russia insists that any agreement must preserve Assad’s continuing reign as a Soviet-style tyrant.

What’s more, the upcoming re-election of Assad (like father, like son) consists of one of the most undemocratic election processes on the planet. The Assad family’s brutal dictatorship, thanks to Moscow, is still going strong in its fifth decade.

There was a time not long ago when the conservatives in Washington stood steadfast against Russian aggression. These “hawks” were the Ukrainians strongest allies, their best friends. At that July 1988 speech in Warren, soon-to-be-president Bush was almost strident in his tone, vowing loyalty to Ukraine forever.

Today, Ukrainian-Americans must look at the ways of Washington and wonder: With friends like these, is it any wonder that we still have Putin-style enemies?